Site Mobile Navigation

Study Cites Lower Standards in Law School Admissions

Kyle McEntee, a lawyer, recently published a report claiming that law schools have lowered their admission standards to allow students who would not have previously qualified to be admitted.Credit
Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

As law schools across the country try to keep their classrooms full, many are admitting students with lesser qualifications, including those with a lower admissions test score — considered an important predictor of whether a graduate will earn the credentials to practice law.

About a third of the 204 accredited law schools had entering classes last year with at least 25 percent of the class consisting of “at risk” students, or those with law school admissions test scores of below 150, according to a new study by Law School Transparency, a nonprofit advocacy organization.

Law school admissions scores closely mirror the final results of the state bar exams, which graduates must pass to qualify as licensed lawyers. Many in legal education consider a score of 150 as a telling dividing line between future success or failure.

“Too many law schools are filling their entering classes with people who face serious risk of not passing the bar exam,” said Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency, which he helped to found six years ago to promote more open law school practices. He said that last year 45 schools, up from eight in 2010, admitted seriously at-risk students.

Most law schools maintain that test scores are only one indicator, albeit an important one, of the ability to pass the bar. They also say they need flexibility in selecting students to assure a diverse population of lawyers.

Yet many schools are also facing pressure from plummeting enrollments — the lowest in decades. Law school enrollment reached a peak in 2010, as many students fled a troubled economy to the schools’ safe harbor. With a swelling crop of students, bar passage rates soared, but it all began to come apart quickly when jobs in law seemed to melt away overnight as the industry adjusted to a changed economy.

Threatening to further weaken laws schools’ position, initial reports from states show that bar passage rates this year are again slumping.

The National Conference of Bar Examiners, a Madison, Wis., organization that oversees the 200-question multiple choice portion of the exam given in most states, found that overall results slipped again, to the lowest point since 1988.

Most states have yet to report the complete results of their July 2015 bar exam, but early numbers paint a dismal picture.

In Oklahoma and New Mexico, for example, the bar passage rates fell by double digits. Oklahoma’s rate tumbled 11 percent, to 68 percent, and New Mexico’s fell 12 percent, to 72 percent, according to Derek T. Muller, a Pepperdine Law School professor who collects the results and posts them on his blog, Excess of Democracy. Arizona was even lower, with an overall passage rate of 65.7 percent this year.

Law graduates typically can take the test over, and repeaters nudge up the pass rate. But the tumbling outcomes for first-time test takers are spurring debate over whether law schools should be admitting students who score poorly on the entry test. The top scores on the multiple-choice exam are between 156 and 180. Scores below 150 are viewed by many as warnings that test takers lack the skills necessary to practice law.

At least two studies, including one this year that examined admissions exam scores from 2000 to 2011, have concluded that scores on the test, administered by the Law School Admission Council, closely track later bar passage rates.

Mr. McEntee of Law School Transparency, a graduate of Vanderbilt University Law School, said his group’s recent study showed that many schools were admitting students whose lack of legal aptitude made them vulnerable to failing the bar. And, at the same time, they are incurring six-figure student debt that will weigh them down in the future.

The steady erosion in admissions scores between 2010 and 2014, Mr. McEntee, said in his study, is “directly linked to the falling bar exam passage rates in many states.”

One school the study deems as having too many students at high risk is Southern Illinois University School of Law, in Carbondale, Ill. The school, which largely draws its students from Kentucky and Missouri, as well as Illinois, slimmed down its class size to 121 students, from 144 students in 2010. In the last five years, its median law school admissions test score also dropped — to 149 from 153, according to figures it provided to accreditors.

“Our experience has been that someone with a 147 score could pass the bar and someone else with 160 could fail, so we don’t think that there is necessarily a relationship between the test and people’s ability to pass the bar,” said Christopher Behan, the school’s associate dean.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Since 2010, Southern Illinois’s bar passage rate also fell 5 percentage points, to 85.54 percent, according to the school’s figures. To help students pass the bar, the school offers a free summer bar preparation course as well as a separate course in the spring. It also added another bar preparation course during the current fall semester.

Mr. Behan insisted that law school remained a winning proposition, noting that 64.8 percent of its 2014 graduates had full-time jobs requiring a juris doctor degree and bar passage — outpacing the 59.9 percent national placement figure.

Other schools, such as the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, chose to shrink class sizes instead. In the face of low bar passage rates, the school lopped off its lowest 25 percent of students and recruited those with strong grade point averages and admissions test scores.

“We had to deal with a dreadful problem with bar passage. The passage rate was 57 percent, so we were 18 percent below the state’s average pass rate,” said Martin J. Katz, the school’s dean.

“We had egg on our faces and our graduates were up in arms,” Mr. Katz recalled. And since most of its graduates remain in the Denver area, those were sentiments the school could not ignore, he added.

“Despite 100 different theories, only a few things correlated: admissions scores and grade point averages,” he said. “We used any combination of them that gave the student a pass rate.”

For students, the current landscape of fewer legal jobs and higher debt means they want more information when considering law school.

Aaron P. Sohaski, who will graduate next year from Thomas Cooley Law School in Michigan, said law schools “need to be more transparent about what the outcomes can be.”

Such information “needs to be proactive because people don’t always notice all the details,” said Mr. Sohaski, who was chairman of the American Bar Association student law division in 2014-15.

While most law schools say no drastic changes are needed, Rebecca W. Berch, retired chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, who is currently chairwoman of the A.B.A.’s national accrediting body for legal education, said: “I’d like law schools to be up-front, telling students that your indicators say you may not have what it takes to pass the bar.”

Justice Berch said that there has been debate over instituting a “mini bar” to test students after their first year of law school, but noted that it would be difficult and expensive to administer to about 40,000 students yearly. California demands what is called a baby bar for certain first-year students, including those at unaccredited law schools in the state, but that affects a smaller number of students.

Such warnings are not sufficient, said Mr. McEntee, who is urging the A.B.A. to tighten standards now because student debt is rising, with an average of $118,670 in 2014, plus interest.

That rising debt, most of it from federal loans, has raised concerns among federal lawmakers like Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who says that the A.B.A. “accreditation is like a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, so consumers look to the accrediting body for answers, when some law schools fall short.”

At-risk law students, Mr. McEntee said, “have little chance of gainful employment in order to pay off the debt they are accumulating.”

Correction: December 18, 2015

An article on Oct. 27 about the correlation between lower admitting standards to law school and a rising proportion of law students’ failing the bar exam misstated which first-year law students California requires to take a “baby bar” to gauge their progress. The requirement applies to students of unaccredited law schools, many of which are for-profit. It does not apply only to for-profit law schools. The error was only recently called to The Times’s attention.

A version of this article appears in print on October 27, 2015, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Study Cites Lower Standards in Law School Admissions. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe